Human Sexuality

“The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations” is a booklet, edited by Mary Eberstadt and Mary Ann Layden and published last year by the Witherspoon Institute. The booklet summarizes a consultation of 54 scholars held in Princeton, N.J. in December 2008 sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute and co-sponsored by the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. A sampling of participating scholars includes Hadley Arkes of Amherst University, Gerard V. Bradley of Notre Dame University’s Law School, J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Foundation, Jean Bethke Elshrain of the University of Chicago, John Finnis of Oxford University, Robert George of Princeton University, William Hurlbut, M.D., of Stanford University Medical School, Mary Ann Layden of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry, Margarita Mooney of the University of North Carolina, David Novak of the University of Toronto, Roger Scruton of Oxford University, Gladys Sweeney of the Institute for the Psychological Studies, and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia.

The April 10, 2010 bulletin of iMAPP Marriage News [1] highlighted this issue. It focused on the Witherspoon Foundation’s recent conference and book, The Social Costs of Pornography.[2]

After summing up Marriage News’s report of the Witherspoon Foundation’s conference and book on the social costs of pornography, I will present the masterful analysis of pornography and “pornovision” offered by a prominent philosopher/theologian during the last quarter of the 20th century, namely, Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II.

Duke University Champions Most Americans know that Duke University’s Men’s basketball team is the 2010 champion of college basketball. But few know that Dr. Monique Chireau, a Duke University expert in obstetrics and gynecology, is a champion of abstinence only programs as the way to help teenage girls forbear having sex, whether allegedly “safe” or “less unsafe,” and as a result avoid getting pregnant and at the same time avoid contracting an STD or sexually transmitted disease.

In 2006, Cardinal Carlo Martini, retired archbishop of Milan and a respected biblical scholar, expressed his opinion that it was morally permissible and prudent for married couples to use condoms when engaging in genital intercourse to prevent transmission of HIV. In doing so, he made his own the view of Dominican Cardinal Georges Cottier, the former theologian of the Pontifical Household, and a number of bishops.

This is the second part of a two-part series on the U.S. Bishops’ newdocument on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love in an Age ofTechnology, issued on November 17(www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ). In thefirst essay I discussed the document’s ethical framework for analyzingparticular forms … Read

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. [1] Reactions to our predicament are suitably alarmist, but still terribly predictable. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy will push for both more abstinence, and higher rates of contraceptive usage among the unmarried. They will call for less complacency and more parental involvement.[2] Planned Parenthood took the occasion to bash abstinence programs while abstinence programs linked the rise to the fact that 68% of public schools employ contraceptive instruction, which has a 4 to 1 funding advantage over abstinence in the United States. [3]

This year marks the tenth “anniversary” of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the “emergency contraceptive,” Plan B. A decade later, Plan B is not only just as unsafe, but now the drug manufacturer is targeting our children.

The FDA first caved to abortion advocates’ demands in 1999 when it approved the prescription status of Plan B. While touted as a drug to prevent pregnancy, the drug manufacturer does not hide the fact that it will prevent the implantation of an embryo. Read

Human Life: a precious gift from God In his magnificent Homily, “Stand Up for Human Life,” that he gave on the Washington Mall on October 7, 1979, Pope John Paul II eloquently defended the intrinsic goodness of human life, including bodily life, declaring: “Human life is not just an idea or an abstraction. Human life is the concrete reality of a being that lives, that acts, that grows and develops. Human life is the concrete reality of a being that is capable of love and of service to humanity.” Moreover, he added: “When God gives life it is forever.” Read

It is well-known by now that the effort to overturn California’s Proposition 8 lost at the California Supreme Court. Proposition 8 is the citizens’ initiative which overturned that same court’s prior decision ‘finding” a right to same-sex “marriage” within the … Read

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the National Abortion Rights and Reproductive Rights Action League (“NARAL”) and its headlining of a reproductive “right” to “choice.” Since its inception, the efforts of recently-recast NARAL Pro-Choice America have resulted in more than 46 million legal abortions in the United States—a number that should shock the public, but is all too often drowned out by NARAL’s noisy rhetoric of reproductive “choice.” For Americans that value and seek to protect human life, the question is: Is life in America better today as a result of NARAL? Read